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| Courtesy: http://www.virgingalactic.com |
1 March 2012: Virgin Galactic, an offshoot of Richard Branson's Virgin Group, expects to test fly its first spacecraft beyond the Earth's atmosphere this year, with commercial suborbital passenger service to follow in 2013 or 2014. Nearly 500 customers have signed up for rides on SpaceShipTwo, a six-passenger, two-pilot spaceship being built and tested by Scaled Composites, an aerospace company.Virgin Galactic is the most visible of a handful of companies developing spaceships for tourism, research, educational and business purposes.SpaceShipTwo, the first of Virgin's planned five-ship fleet, has completed 31testflights.
Link:http://www.virgingalactic.com
2 March 2012:India’s fastest supercomputer will soon be housed in Bangalore. The yet-to-be-named high-performance computing system will be used for genome informatics, geo-science informatics (earth, ocean and atmosphere) and engineering sciences. In the 12th five-year plan (2012-’17), the Central Government has decided to allot `6,000 crore to propel India into the elite supercomputing club.A data centre is being planned at the CMMACS facility in Belur, near the old Bangalore airport. Today, all 40 CSIR labs in India are interconnected using the National Knowledge Network, which enables all scientists to access the supercomputing facility remotely.Link: http://nkn.in
3 March 2012:A new species of bat is recently been discovered in Vietnam. It is called Griffin's Leaf-nosed Bat (Hipposideros griffini).The new bat species is named after the late Donald Redfield Griffin, a professor at Rockefeller University in New York who studied echolocation in bats.The Griffin's leaf-nosed bat is like Hipposideros armiger, or the Great Roundleaf Bat. While Griffin's Leaf-nosed Bat is smaller, the two animals have similarly flattened noses and sometimes live in the same environment in Vietnam. But unlike the great roundleaf bat, the Griffin's leaf-nosed bat is much calmer.The discovery is described in the Journal of Mammology.Link: http://www.mammalsociety.org
4 March 2012:Cassini spacecraft sent by NASA has detected Oxygen around one of Saturn's icy moons, Dione.The discovery supports a theory that suggests all of the moons near Saturn and Jupiter might have Oxygen around them.Researchers say that their finding increases the likelihood of finding the ingredients for life on it.Dione's sister moon, Enceladus is thought to harbour a liquid ocean below its icy surface. The same is thought to be true of Europa, Callisto and Ganymede which orbit Jupiter.European Space Agency is planning to send an orbiter to explore Jupiter's icy moons - known as the Juice mission.The study is published in Geophysical Research Letters.Link: http://www.nasa.gov
5 March 2012:Mars, will be at its closest distace to to Earth and glow at its brightest today.Every 26 months, the orbits of Earth and Mars align such that the two planets form a relatively straight line with the sun. This cosmic event is called an Opposition, because Mars sits on the exact opposite side of Earth from the sun.Mars will be brighter till end of April 2012. It will be visible in the night sky until February 2013.The next Mars-Opposition will occur on April 8, 2014, whereas next closest approach is on April 14, 2014. The last time it was at Opposition was on January 30, 2010.The orbits of Earth and Mars are the reason for this. Link: http://cseligman.com
6 March 2012:
Gabon.Link: http://www.aardo.org
7 March 2012: Although a collision with a vast tower of ice-berg ultimately brought the ship RMS Titanic to its sticky end, it was an incredibly rare combination of astronomical factors including the closest approach of the moon to Earth in 1,400 years caused an unusually high tide in January 1912, according to researchers lead by Prof Donald Olson of Texas State University.This once-in-a-lifetime swell would have swept a vast field of icebergs from their normal resting place off the coast of Canada and caused them to drift further south.It would have taken them almost exactly three months to reach the shipping lanes where the Titanic sank on April 14, 1912.Link: http://www.rmstitanic.net
8 March 2012: The US$3 million, UNESCO-Obiang Nguema Mbasogo International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences changes its name.The Prize was established in 2008 and was named after Equatorial Guinea's president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who agreed to finance it.Now, UNESCO's executive board has voted 33 to 18 following a proposal by Equatorial Guinea to change the name to"UNESCO-Equatorial Guinea International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences" and that it would be funded by the country's state treasury.There was support from Arab states, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, India, Russia and Venezuela while European Union and the United States opposed.Link: http://portal.unesco.org
9 March 2012:Indian scientists have successfully cloned world's first Pashmina Goat "Noori" by using the indigenously-developed "hand guided technique".The Changthangi or Pashmina goat is a breed of goat from Tibet and Ladakhi Changthang, usually raised for Pashmina wool.Under a World Bank-funded project, the Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology- Kashmir was working with the Karnal-based National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI), the nodal agency of the project, to clone Pashmina goats.The scientists used somatic cells from the ear of a goat to produce the clone. NDRI had used the same technology to clone the buffalo clone earlier.Link: http://www.ndri.res.in
10 March 2012:Researchers in Cambridge have deciphered the genetic code of the Gorilla, the last of the Great Apes to be sequenced. The sequencing was done in Kamilah, a she-Gorila that lives in San Diego.The team also compared Kamilah's genome with the Western Lowland Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and Eastern Lowland Gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri).Researchers have already sequenced the genomes of Chimpanzees and Orang-utans. Comparisons confirm that Chimpanzees are our closest relatives, sharing 99% of our DNA. Gorillas come a close second with 98%, and Orangutans third with 97% share.Link: http://www.nature.com
11March 2012:Bird flu influenza has resurfaced in Tripura after one-and-a-half months. High Security Animal Disease Laboratory (HSADL),Bhopal has confirmed the presence of the H5N1strain of Avian Influenza virus in the affected birds from the state-owned Gandhigram Poultry Farm in western Tripura.Over 6,200 poultry and ducks have been culled in last week of January 2012 in western Tripura after a birdflu at Lembuchara and in adjoining
villages.Tripura, which shares an 856-km border with bird flu hit Bangladesh, had been affected by avian influenza since in April and May 2008, forcing authorities to cull over 250,000 poultry birds and ducks then. Link: http://hsadl.nic.in.
13 March 2012: Scientists at Fermilab, US have gotten even closer to proving the existence of the elusive Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle" that supplies mass to matter and would complete Albert Einstein's Einstein's Standard Model of Physics.Analyzing data from Fermilab's 6.3-km-long Tevatron Particle accelerator, scientists have produced some 1,000 Higgs particles over a decade of work.The weight of Higgs particles found at Fermilab was consistent with those detected at the more powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, at the CERN research center near Geneva, Switzerland.Link: http://www.fnal.gov
15 March 2012:The caramel flavouring used in Coca-Cola and Pepsi can cause cancer, according to National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in the US. The drink has been made to include a caramel flavouring known as 4-methylimidazole (4-MEI). Under Californian law, drinks containing a certain level of carcinogens must have cancer-warning label on their packaging. But, Coco Cola and Pepsi companies will be continuing to sell it in Britain and the rest of Europe, with no cautionary labelling.US Food and Drug Administration said someone would have to drink 1000 cans of Pepsi or Coca Cola per day to ingest the required dosage of the chemical.Link:http://niehs.nih.gov
16 March 2012:The initial selection of crew members for China's first manned space docking mission has been completed, and it includes female astronauts.The manned spacecraft Shenzhou-9 will take its crew members to board the Tiangong-1 space module lab, which was launched in September last year and completed the country's first space docking with the unmanned Shenzhou-8 spacecraft in November.The perfect docking between Shenzhou-8 and Tiangong-1 has laid the perfect foundation for the manned docking this year. Tiangong-1has been orbiting normally for more than 160 days, and is capable of docking with Shenzhou-9 and accommodating astronauts.Link: http://www.cnsa.gov.cn
17 March 2012:Researchers from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and Manipal University have discovered 26 megalithic constructions at Byse, 140 kmfrom Mangalore, India, dating prior to 1000BC, and being the first strong evidence of a monument with intentional solar and stellar alignments among Indian megaliths.Using computer simulations, the team found that the standing stones are aligned to match the two solstices and equinoxes. The study ‘Stone alignment with solar and other sightlines in South India’ is published in the latest issue of Current Science.Link:http://manipal.academia.edu
18 March 2012:The mysterious fossils unearthed in Chinese caves could be of a previously unknown type of human, as the skeletons possess a highly unusual mix of bygone and modern human features.These new fossils might be of a previously unknown species , one that survived until the very end of the ice age around 11,000 years ago. At least three fossil specimens were uncovered in 1989 by miners quarrying limestone at Maludong or Red Deer Cave near the city of Mengzi in southwest China.The scientists are calling them the "Red Deer Cave People" because they cooked extinct red deer in their namesake cave.Link: http://www.plosone.org
19 March 2012:Tender coconut water is to be the official drink of Kerala.The annual budget for 2012-13, also proposes to implement an Industrial park in Brahmapuram,Kochi and an Edu-Health City in Malappuram and a Global Ayurveda Village. A botanical garden is to be set up at Parvathymala in Munnar and a biological park in Thonakcal, Thiruvananthapuram. The budget assures planting of the perennial grass Vetiver (Chrysopogon zizanioides), to protect river banks inspired from the success of MGNREGA programme at the Mundeswari River in Hooghly district in West Bengal. Link: http://www.hooghlymgnrega.org
20 March 2012: NASA has released a new atlas of more than 560 million stars, galaxies and asteroids, many never seen before.The more than 18,000 images were taken by the Wide-field Survey Explorer (WISE), NASA’s infrared space telescope.With WISE, scientists discovered Y Dwarf stars, the dimmest stars of the brown dwarf family.Scientists were also able to find the first-ever asteroid with the same orbit as Earth. Neptune, Jupiter and Mars also have these so-called trojan asteroids, but Earth’s had been difficult to find because they’re only visible in daylight.Link:http://www.nasa.gov
21 March 2012:India's first bird monitoring system for common birds was launched by Mumbai-based Nature Forever Society (NFS).The system is based on a website, allowing users from across the country to provide data such as number and types of birds in his or her locality. From the individual contributions of users across the country, the system will be able to map our geographical distribution of birds.The programme maps 18 common birds such as House Sparrow, Common Hoopoe, White-throated Kingfisher, Green Bee-eaters, Black Kite, House Crow and Rose-ringed Parakeet.Link:http://www.cbmi.in
22 March 2012:The Andra Pradesh State-run Bharat Dynamics Ltd (BDL) will invest Rs 30,000 crore in its production facility near Ibrahimpatnam to manufacture surface-to-air missiles for defence purposes.The facility will produce sophisticated medium range surface-to-air missiles. This is BDL’s fourth manufacturing unit in Andhra Pradesh and the fifth such facility in the country.Recently, the company has set up a facility to manufacture underwater torpedoes-conceived by the Naval Science and Technological Laboratory in Visakhapatnam. The facility is likely to commence operations within the next three months.Link:http://bdl.ap.nic.in
23 March 2012:The launch of the first commercially built space capsule to the International Space Station will occur at the end of April. California-based Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) is now aiming to launch its unmanned Dragon spacecraft on a demonstration flight to the orbiting outpost on April 30.The Dragon capsule will launch atop SpaceX's own Falcon 9 rocket and, if successful, will be the first privately built spacecraft ever to rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station.The flight is designed to test the robotic spacecraft's ability to haul cargo to the orbiting complex. Link:http://www.spacex.com
24 March 2012:Chinese scientists sequenced the genome of the Sweet Orange (Citrus sinensis), which can help to understand the complex genetic make-up of the crop in order to improve its quality and yield. It was after a year’s effort that the team of experts from Central China Agricultural University in Wuhan could successfully sequence the genome sequence of Sweet Orange, marking it the first fruit crop sequenced by Chinese scientists.The Sweet Orange, which originated in China, is the most commonly grown fruit tree, accounting for about 60 per cent of total citrus production in the world.Link:http://www.hzau.edu.cn
25 March 2012:The preliminary work on India's first Neutrino Observatory is set to start in April.The underground experimental laboratory is spread over 26 hectares at Pottipuram village in Bodi West Hills of Theni district,Tamilnadu. It will detect and study neutrinos, the smallest particles known to humans.A huge Neutrino detector would be built in a tunnel under a massive rock.Tata Institute of Fundamental Research is the nodal institution for the project. It will also involve 25 leading research institutions.The project is undertaken by the Departments of Atomic Energy and Science & Technology.Link: http://www.ino.tifr.res.in
26 March 2012:The Union government has approved the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) which can be used as a tool for promoting governmental transparency and efficiency. An Open Government Partnership was launched last year by the United States and seven other governments. Forty-three other governments have joined the partnership, which has endorsed an Open Government Declaration.India has not joined the partnership.The policy also provides for pricing, with the Ministries and Departments being asked to formulate their norms for data. Link: http://www.dst.gov.in
27 March 2012:Researchers at Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, discovered two planets orbiting a star, dubbed HIP 11952. The planets, 375 light-years away are the oldest alien worlds yet discovered, with an estimated age of 12.8 billion years, most likely formed at the dawn of the universe, less than a billion years after the big bang.The discovery indicates that planet formation in the early universe was possible despite the fact that stars in existence back then were "metal-poor".The idea of planets springing from such a stellar makeup runs counter to a widely accepted theory called the Accretion Model, which says that heavy elements are needed to form planets.Link: http://exoplanet.eu
28 March 2012:Titanic director James Cameron dove to the Earth's deepest point aboard a specially designed submarine called Deepsea Challenger, making him the first man to travel alone to the near 7-mile depth of the Marianas Trench.He reached a depth of 35,756 feet. The trip took two hours and 36 minutes.Cameron collected samples for research in marine biology, microbiology, astrobiology, marine geology and geophysics. He also spent time filming Marianas Trench, about 200 miles southwest of the Pacific island of Guam.The expedition was sponsored by National
27 March 2012:Researchers at Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, discovered two planets orbiting a star, dubbed HIP 11952. The planets, 375 light-years away are the oldest alien worlds yet discovered, with an estimated age of 12.8 billion years, most likely formed at the dawn of the universe, less than a billion years after the big bang.The discovery indicates that planet formation in the early universe was possible despite the fact that stars in existence back then were "metal-poor".The idea of planets springing from such a stellar makeup runs counter to a widely accepted theory called the Accretion Model, which says that heavy elements are needed to form planets.Link: http://exoplanet.eu
28 March 2012:Titanic director James Cameron dove to the Earth's deepest point aboard a specially designed submarine called Deepsea Challenger, making him the first man to travel alone to the near 7-mile depth of the Marianas Trench.He reached a depth of 35,756 feet. The trip took two hours and 36 minutes.Cameron collected samples for research in marine biology, microbiology, astrobiology, marine geology and geophysics. He also spent time filming Marianas Trench, about 200 miles southwest of the Pacific island of Guam.The expedition was sponsored by National
Geographic.Link:http://deepseachallenge.com
29 March 2012:A team of botanists from Malabar Botanical Garden and the Zamorin's Guruvayurappan College, Kozhikode,Kerala has reported the discovery of a new species of plant from Kannur district.The newly discovered plant belongs to the Eriocaulon genus with over 80 endemic species in India. The Madayipara area itself harbours five species.Named Eriocaulon madayiparense, the species was found at Madayipara, a laterite hillock located in the foothills of the Western Ghats.The team has published the discovery in Phytokeys, an open access journal dedicated to biodiversity research. Link:http://www.pensoft.net.
30 March 2012:National Green Tribunal of India suspended the environment clearance granted to Posco's mega steel project in Jagatsinghpur district of Orissa in January 2011till the environment ministry reviews it afresh.The tribunal pointed out that Memorandum of Understanding between the Orissa government and Posco states that the project is for production of 12 million tonnes of steel per annum (MTPA) but the environment impact assessment (EIA) report has been prepared only for 4 million tonnes of steel per in the first phase.Posco India Pvt Ltd was granted environmental clearance for its two projects, steel-cum-captive power plant project and captive minor port in 2007.Link:http://moef.nic.in.
31 March 2012:This month marked the 10th anniversary of the introduction of genetically modified (GM) Bt cotton in India. Ten years ago, in 2002, permission was granted to U.S. based Monsanto company for experimental cultivation of Bt cotton in 10,000 hectares in different parts of the country. Today, with the push given to it, the acreage has gone up to over 12 million hectares, especially after Maharashtra permitted commercial cultivation trials of Bt cotton from June 2005.However in Andhra Pradesh, the State government estimates show that, out of 47 lakh acres with Bt cotton, 33.73 lakh acres have failed.Link:http://www.ifpri.org
The days of space tourism is not far off!
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